WEBVTT NOTE Mises Institute Publications (video) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 The Theory of Money and Credit 2 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:43.160 That's all. Sometimes it seems like that's all we do. My network administrator, David 3 00:00:43.160 --> 00:00:49.920 Wexler, always corrects me. He says, Jeff, life itself is beta, so just get used to it. 4 00:00:49.920 --> 00:00:58.080 Yeah, so unfortunately, Mr. Denson couldn't be with us today to talk a little bit about 5 00:00:58.080 --> 00:01:04.900 about his book, but let me just tell you about the origins of that book. The title is A Century 6 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:12.040 of War and it's about, I think it's about maybe 200 pages, something like this. It began 7 00:01:12.040 --> 00:01:18.720 in a lecture he gave at the Mises Institute and we published as a monograph and put it 8 00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:25.120 online but it was a hard copy and online and everybody was downloading it online. It's 9 00:01:25.120 --> 00:01:29.560 There's a wonderful sort of sweeping and a single lengthy essay, it's a sweeping account 10 00:01:29.560 --> 00:01:34.880 of the relationship between the rise of war and the rise of big government and the decline 11 00:01:34.880 --> 00:01:35.880 of freedom. 12 00:01:35.880 --> 00:01:41.300 And if you've heard John speak, he has just a wonderful mastery of the historical detail. 13 00:01:41.300 --> 00:01:51.980 And he's not an academic, he's an attorney and currently a judge, but in some ways it's 14 00:01:51.980 --> 00:01:57.380 It's a wonderful thing because it frees him up to just look at everything completely in 15 00:01:57.380 --> 00:02:02.540 a sort of fresh way without having to worry about colleagues breathing down his neck. 16 00:02:02.540 --> 00:02:08.500 So you get a really beautiful story in his writings and this one essay illustrates that 17 00:02:08.500 --> 00:02:09.740 very well. 18 00:02:09.740 --> 00:02:14.660 Well, we ran out of the hard copy, which is an intriguing thing. 19 00:02:14.660 --> 00:02:19.420 This is an essay that you can download from the website and it's about, I don't know, 20 00:02:19.420 --> 00:02:32.620 I'm going to talk a little bit about the relationship between online and offline copy here in a minute. 21 00:02:32.620 --> 00:02:36.580 So we ran out of those copies and we thought well if we're going to reprint it let's just 22 00:02:36.580 --> 00:02:40.740 put it in a book together with some of his other essays and he's written some wonderful 23 00:02:40.740 --> 00:02:48.320 material on the origins of the Civil War and we're talking about pioneering stuff here 24 00:02:48.320 --> 00:03:00.800 and World War I and World War II about how a state can bring about a war, well, can desire 25 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:07.440 a war but have to overcome the obstacle of public resistance and the best way to overcome 26 00:03:07.440 --> 00:03:11.060 that is by getting the enemy to fire the first shot. 27 00:03:11.060 --> 00:03:16.360 So he's written a series of studies using this little sort of motif to re-understand 28 00:03:16.360 --> 00:03:19.640 in American History in a way that's very surprising and interesting. 29 00:03:19.640 --> 00:03:24.840 So these essays are in there asivid well and also some reflections on current literature. 30 00:03:24.840 --> 00:03:29.360 So altogether it makes a wonderful little package and that will probably be available 31 00:03:29.360 --> 00:03:34.760 in a couple of months. 32 00:03:34.760 --> 00:03:38.680 Let me just before I go on with some of the other projects we have here, talk a little 33 00:03:38.680 --> 00:03:42.300 bit about the relationship between online and offline texts. 34 00:03:42.300 --> 00:03:48.740 Now, you'll notice that in the last few days we've come out with this new book by Jesus 35 00:03:48.740 --> 00:03:56.140 Huerta de Soto, it's called Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles, if you saw it out there. 36 00:03:56.140 --> 00:03:57.140 Does everybody know about this book? 37 00:03:57.140 --> 00:03:58.140 Have you been reading about it? 38 00:03:58.140 --> 00:03:59.140 Okay. 39 00:03:59.140 --> 00:04:00.140 It's all the rage. 40 00:04:00.140 --> 00:04:05.260 It's the new happening thing. 41 00:04:05.260 --> 00:04:09.180 It's about 900 pages, so it's very large. 42 00:04:09.180 --> 00:04:13.060 An undergraduate wrote me recently, he was in the second year of economics, and he said, 43 00:04:13.060 --> 00:04:20.540 gosh, I'm not sure that I really need some huge treatise on fiduciary media, Roman law, 44 00:04:20.540 --> 00:04:30.060 the origins of banking in the Middle Ages, detailed comic critiques of fractional reserve 45 00:04:30.060 --> 00:04:31.060 theory. 46 00:04:31.060 --> 00:04:32.980 I mean, is this really necessary? 47 00:04:32.980 --> 00:04:38.940 But I told him, I said, look, this is absolutely essential for you, because let's say you 48 00:04:38.940 --> 00:04:47.740 We have an economics professor who is sort of dismissing Austrian economics as a theory 49 00:04:47.740 --> 00:04:49.020 not worthy of his consideration. 50 00:04:49.020 --> 00:04:55.420 All he has to do is walk up with this enormous book, which is huge, big, thick, huge thing, 51 00:04:55.420 --> 00:05:01.500 heavy, and say, oh, would you like to see my new book I'm reading on money, bank, credit 52 00:05:01.500 --> 00:05:03.020 and business cycles? 53 00:05:03.020 --> 00:05:07.940 It's very large and it's quite an undertaking, and I'd be glad to let you borrow it any time. 54 00:05:07.940 --> 00:05:14.300 So I explained to him that this has a great psychological impact on a professor who hasn't 55 00:05:14.300 --> 00:05:19.380 done any reading in years, you know, he's a tenured full professor and so he'll somehow 56 00:05:19.380 --> 00:05:23.860 get the impression that my students are, could it be that my students are even more advanced 57 00:05:23.860 --> 00:05:28.540 than I am and I can't even conceive of sitting down and reading such a huge book, you know. 58 00:05:28.540 --> 00:05:33.620 And from then on, you know, the kid gets straight A's, he's left alone and that's it. 59 00:05:33.620 --> 00:05:50.620 In any case, this book, we're hoping that this book is not just going to serve that purpose but is going to be a very lasting contribution to literature and I don't think there's any doubt that it's going to take half a decade or two for it to be fully absorbed. 60 00:05:50.620 --> 00:05:59.620 A treatise on this level doesn't come out very often and when it does, it takes a while to take hold. So it's very exciting. 61 00:05:59.620 --> 00:06:05.780 Guido Holzman is always reminding us that theory is very, very difficult to write and 62 00:06:05.780 --> 00:06:11.320 very difficult to sort of originate and history is easier in general from his point of view 63 00:06:11.320 --> 00:06:16.220 as a theoretician and there are many other kinds of scholarship that are slightly easier 64 00:06:16.220 --> 00:06:21.540 but writing pure theory is very difficult and that's why we so rarely see a big treatise 65 00:06:21.540 --> 00:06:25.580 of pure theory and that's really what this is but also integrates with Roman law and 66 00:06:25.580 --> 00:06:31.260 You know there was parts of it that I wanted to excerpt on the website for a daily article 67 00:06:31.260 --> 00:06:37.460 but you know it's very detailed and very systematic and super, super scholarly with lots of footnotes 68 00:06:37.460 --> 00:06:39.400 and I wasn't quite sure. 69 00:06:39.400 --> 00:06:43.660 So what we did instead is we just put the whole book up online the same day we began 70 00:06:43.660 --> 00:06:44.660 to offer it for sale. 71 00:06:44.660 --> 00:06:45.660 It's up there. 72 00:06:45.660 --> 00:06:46.660 You can go to it. 73 00:06:46.660 --> 00:06:53.580 Look under the study guide and up comes a PDF file very fast of 900 pages and you're 74 00:06:53.580 --> 00:06:59.220 Welcome to Sit and Read It, and we encourage everybody to do so. 75 00:06:59.220 --> 00:07:02.580 And the advantage of this, of course, is that, well, there's many advantages. 76 00:07:02.580 --> 00:07:04.300 One is it gets the word out. 77 00:07:04.300 --> 00:07:08.940 But you look at it and you think, you know, maybe I do just need to order this. 78 00:07:08.940 --> 00:07:13.540 And sure enough, many people have bought the book and it's just great. 79 00:07:13.540 --> 00:07:18.700 You know, to have a book like that online as well as in your bookshelf is a wonderful 80 00:07:18.700 --> 00:07:20.940 thing, especially if you're writing papers. 81 00:07:20.940 --> 00:07:31.540 The book is not always where you want it to be, the internet is. 82 00:07:31.540 --> 00:07:35.140 So if you remember a passage, you can go to the online resource, you can copy and paste 83 00:07:35.140 --> 00:07:38.540 out of that text, you can put it into a paper wherever you happen to be. 84 00:07:38.540 --> 00:07:39.540 That's great. 85 00:07:39.540 --> 00:07:49.420 So the online copy enhances the value of the offline copy and the other way around too. 86 00:07:49.420 --> 00:07:54.260 So we don't worry about this at all. You know, there are many people who don't understand 87 00:07:54.260 --> 00:08:00.980 the new media who are somehow oddly panicked about this. And for some reason these same 88 00:08:00.980 --> 00:08:05.700 people are very concerned about issues of copyright and they're just obsessed about 89 00:08:05.700 --> 00:08:12.620 this. I don't know, I'm really just about fed up. I mean, it's a very narrow, uncreative 90 00:08:12.620 --> 00:08:19.180 way to think. You know, don't we need to not give people information they desperately desire 91 00:08:19.180 --> 00:08:23.420 even if we can do so for free because then that would somehow prevent us from squeezing 92 00:08:23.420 --> 00:08:29.420 that last dime out of them, you know, which we feel like they should pay us. 93 00:08:29.420 --> 00:08:31.740 This is really the mentality that goes on here. 94 00:08:31.740 --> 00:08:36.780 And really I think the fallacy here is you're really underestimating your market. 95 00:08:36.780 --> 00:08:44.060 And I can tell you, you know, ever since the age of the web came about, we've discovered 96 00:08:44.060 --> 00:08:48.180 that the Austrian school is not a small school. 97 00:08:48.180 --> 00:08:54.140 The libertarianism is not just a small group of people, just adding one or two members 98 00:08:54.140 --> 00:08:55.140 every year. 99 00:08:55.140 --> 00:08:59.620 This is a massive international movement that is growing all the time. 100 00:08:59.620 --> 00:09:04.660 The Mises Institute website is, I'm quite certain, the largest, most heavily trafficked 101 00:09:04.660 --> 00:09:11.460 non-profit research institute site of its kind anywhere in the world. 102 00:09:11.460 --> 00:09:16.460 And we compete very closely with large commercial ventures like The Economist magazine, and 103 00:09:16.460 --> 00:09:21.920 We beat the World Bank and the Federal Reserve and the IMF. 104 00:09:21.920 --> 00:09:31.140 This is a very large movement and we're doing our job and we get the word out in whatever 105 00:09:31.140 --> 00:09:32.140 way we can. 106 00:09:32.140 --> 00:09:38.180 So that means print, offline, online, offline, any way we possibly can, podcasting, we want 107 00:09:38.180 --> 00:09:45.580 to do it all and if we can do it at zero price as you pretty much can do, well that's not 108 00:09:45.580 --> 00:09:55.780 Some of the books we have coming out in the near future, we're putting together the libertarian 109 00:09:55.780 --> 00:10:02.500 forum and a two-volume paperback volume that's been online for a long time, you can download 110 00:10:02.500 --> 00:10:07.980 it and this is a case where truly having the book in your hand is a wonderful advantage 111 00:10:07.980 --> 00:10:13.900 I can tell you, mainly because these are eight, sometimes eight, sixteen-page issues that 112 00:10:13.900 --> 00:10:19.900 You know, you go to page one and it continues to page three and then you go back, you know, like that, like in the old days when they used to do this kind of stuff. 113 00:10:19.900 --> 00:10:27.900 So it's very difficult. You have to print it out. So we're offering that whole thing in book form very soon. 114 00:10:27.900 --> 00:10:39.900 Other publishing projects we have in the future, a vast collection of Rothbard's theoretical work, applications and criticisms, the kind of an elaboration of Man Economy and State. 115 00:10:39.900 --> 00:10:48.780 That could be anywhere between 900 and 1,000 pages. It's going to be called Economic Controversies. 116 00:10:48.780 --> 00:10:59.140 And a book by Mises of essays written in the interwar period, in which, well, let me put 117 00:10:59.140 --> 00:11:04.240 this way. For many years, I think many of us have been under the impression somehow 118 00:11:04.240 --> 00:11:07.900 that Mises didn't write anything on business cycles between 1912, where there was just 119 00:11:07.900 --> 00:11:13.740 This is sort of a kernel of a theory. And then Human Action. This is not true at all. 120 00:11:13.740 --> 00:11:18.840 We have some idea that Hayek did all the business cycle work in the interwar period and predicted 121 00:11:18.840 --> 00:11:24.640 the Great Depression, which is true. He didn't do all the work. Mises wrote a vast amount, 122 00:11:24.640 --> 00:11:29.540 but it didn't get translated until 1978. And then when it was translated and published, 123 00:11:29.540 --> 00:11:36.540 it was not in a form that was readily available. These are wonderful essays, very powerful 124 00:12:07.900 --> 00:12:37.900 It's just incredibly great. It's tragic that these essays didn't appear in English at all until 1978. They were all published in German. They were very famous until Mises was forced out of Vienna, but they've not been well known in English, and I re-read the other day when we were going through this manuscript the Nobel Prize which Hayek received so justly, but they specifically named his work on business 125 00:12:37.900 --> 00:12:42.980 cycle is his preeminent contribution and his anticipation of the Great Depression. 126 00:12:42.980 --> 00:12:50.340 Well, and that's wonderful, but Hayek learned from Mises, and Mises, too, wrote about this 127 00:12:50.340 --> 00:12:54.260 subject and did so brilliantly. 128 00:12:54.260 --> 00:13:01.580 So that's coming out, and the name of the book is The Causes of the Economic Crisis 129 00:13:01.580 --> 00:13:03.820 and Other Essays Before and After the Great Depression. 130 00:13:03.820 --> 00:13:08.420 It'll be, I forget now how many pages, 250, something like that. 131 00:13:08.420 --> 00:13:15.300 For a New Liberty, Rothbard's book, you know, this is a book that founded the, that in many 132 00:13:15.300 --> 00:13:21.160 ways was the founding manifesto of the American libertarian movement. 133 00:13:21.160 --> 00:13:26.420 And it's a very interesting case because I guess Rothbard had had an article in the New 134 00:13:26.420 --> 00:13:31.900 York Times discussing the new libertarianism and why it's different from right and left. 135 00:13:31.900 --> 00:13:45.900 In many ways the modern libertarian movement was founded as a response to Nixon's egregious economic policies and price and wage controls and the collapse of the gold standard. 136 00:13:45.900 --> 00:13:55.900 And so it was a very strong argument that conservatism and republicanism, as we've known it, is not going to guarantee, it's not going to protect your liberty and we need something completely new. 137 00:13:55.900 --> 00:14:09.900 So Rothbard wrote this in the New York Times, a publisher contacted him, asked him to write up a complete treatise, it was the one and only large commercial, how do you say, commission that Rothbard ever really received. 138 00:14:09.900 --> 00:14:24.900 But instead of writing a watered-down treatise designed to appeal to the broadest possible numbers, he wrote a very tough-minded piece of scholarship that covers philosophy and history and American politics and everything else. 139 00:14:24.900 --> 00:14:30.820 and there is something in there for everybody to dislike, I promise you. 140 00:14:30.820 --> 00:14:37.020 But it's great, the book just rattles you to your very core and it hasn't been available 141 00:14:37.020 --> 00:14:39.180 for a long time. 142 00:14:39.180 --> 00:14:44.100 You know, we were just discussing outside a little bit ago how absolutely important 143 00:14:44.100 --> 00:14:49.340 it is for us to be able to have our ideas out there, that's the only weapon we have. 144 00:14:49.340 --> 00:14:56.620 We have a lot of brilliant people who have written some very powerful things and it doesn't 145 00:14:56.620 --> 00:15:00.620 do any good for anybody unless you can find them, unless they're available, unless they're 146 00:15:00.620 --> 00:15:01.620 circulating. 147 00:15:01.620 --> 00:15:04.940 So it's absolutely critical that we do this. 148 00:15:04.940 --> 00:15:06.540 This is pretty much everything we do. 149 00:15:06.540 --> 00:15:12.500 I mean, we want to get the ideas out there and as Mises believed and we believe here 150 00:15:12.500 --> 00:15:19.460 that the right ideas behind, alive in the culture, are going to transform a society. 151 00:15:19.460 --> 00:15:25.860 And we have to believe that, and we do believe that, and so that's why publishing is the 152 00:15:25.860 --> 00:15:26.860 most important thing. 153 00:15:26.860 --> 00:15:33.420 And let us never forget, too, that time marches forward, and there's always a new generation 154 00:15:33.420 --> 00:15:35.860 that has to be retaught and rediscovered things. 155 00:15:35.860 --> 00:15:37.540 We find this out all the time. 156 00:15:37.540 --> 00:15:40.620 I don't know how many of you have been on the Mises chat room, but there's a lot of 157 00:15:40.620 --> 00:15:47.580 Young people there who have limited exposure to literature, but they're very anxious to learn. 158 00:15:47.580 --> 00:15:53.580 I've made a passing reference in one discussion I was having with somebody to the book Brave New World. 159 00:15:53.580 --> 00:15:58.780 He said, oh, well, that's very interesting. Who wrote that? And where can I get it? 160 00:15:58.780 --> 00:16:02.780 You know, so sort of taken aback, you know, who doesn't know about Brave New World? 161 00:16:02.780 --> 00:16:07.580 But there's always a new generation, and people need to be reintroduced to these ideas, 162 00:16:07.580 --> 00:16:10.540 and Literature has to be available for them. 163 00:16:10.540 --> 00:16:14.340 It's absolutely heartbreaking when any of our wonderful, 164 00:16:14.340 --> 00:16:16.940 one of the treasures of the Austrian literature 165 00:16:16.940 --> 00:16:20.300 becomes unavailable, as has happened in a number of cases. 166 00:16:21.460 --> 00:16:25.160 Henry Hazlitt is a case in point. 167 00:16:25.160 --> 00:16:27.940 We all adore his work. 168 00:16:27.940 --> 00:16:30.660 It's very sad that some of his books are not available 169 00:16:30.660 --> 00:16:34.000 and we're doing whatever we can to assist with this. 170 00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:37.180 I should say something about the, 171 00:16:37.180 --> 00:16:43.620 So we're in a publishing boom right now, the institute is, partially made possible by technological 172 00:16:43.620 --> 00:16:50.580 changes that have made it more financially feasible for us to do this. 173 00:16:50.580 --> 00:16:59.540 But also absolutely critical in this work has been our donors, who have also seen the 174 00:16:59.540 --> 00:17:06.220 importance of our publishing program and are assisting us to underwrite these projects 175 00:17:06.220 --> 00:17:07.580 so that we can make them affordable. 176 00:17:07.580 --> 00:17:12.780 You know, Ed Stringham's book, Ed, how much is your book? 177 00:17:12.780 --> 00:17:13.660 $110. 178 00:17:13.660 --> 00:17:16.300 Yeah, $110. 179 00:17:16.300 --> 00:17:19.940 And I remember when a publisher put out 180 00:17:19.940 --> 00:17:21.900 Rothbard's History of Economic Thought initially, 181 00:17:21.900 --> 00:17:25.300 it was totally, it was completely unaffordable. 182 00:17:25.300 --> 00:17:27.860 One of the reasons that these publishers can get away with this 183 00:17:27.860 --> 00:17:31.820 is that they face a kind of inelastic demand curve 184 00:17:31.820 --> 00:17:34.940 with EU libraries, which have subscriptions 185 00:17:34.940 --> 00:17:41.500 to buy their books, as long as they don't just completely alarm them, I'm sure there's 186 00:17:41.500 --> 00:17:45.020 some reservation price that some of these libraries have, but these publishers can get 187 00:17:45.020 --> 00:17:50.300 away with charging outrageous prices for their books and printing only just enough to sell 188 00:17:50.300 --> 00:17:59.900 to these libraries, and then they go away, and it's very sad, but also I understand that 189 00:17:59.900 --> 00:18:04.860 this is what the economics of the book publishing industry requires of them, is because there 190 00:18:04.860 --> 00:18:34.860 There are donors who are very interested and understand the importance of the thriving of good ideas in a culture that we've been able to undertake the kind of publishing projects we're doing and we're able to put out this De Soto book for, right now it's available for $45 and it's a wonderful book, beautiful production values in every way. The Scholar's Edition of Human Action is very low price considering what it is and it's true for all of these. 191 00:18:34.860 --> 00:18:42.100 all of these projects and it's made only possible because people are willing to underwrite them 192 00:18:42.100 --> 00:18:46.940 for us and assist in making them available to students. 193 00:18:46.940 --> 00:18:58.020 Okay, my time is up, but let me say something about other things that we're doing. 194 00:18:58.020 --> 00:19:03.580 I've talked a lot about the new Mises Institute bowtie and this is a very important topic 195 00:19:03.580 --> 00:19:15.860 You know, bow ties aren't for everybody, and this one was six months in design. 196 00:19:15.860 --> 00:19:16.860 Please look at it. 197 00:19:16.860 --> 00:19:17.860 Just appreciate it. 198 00:19:17.860 --> 00:19:18.860 If you're not going to buy it, it's fine. 199 00:19:18.860 --> 00:19:19.860 Just go out and appreciate it. 200 00:19:19.860 --> 00:19:21.780 This is a thing of great beauty. 201 00:19:21.780 --> 00:19:27.020 When we put it together, the idea was that we would do a bow tie that not only reflected 202 00:19:27.020 --> 00:19:33.860 Mises' heritage and history and his family. So you can see the detail on the crest is 203 00:19:33.860 --> 00:19:36.540 absolutely beautiful. You can see the little tin commandments and everything. It's just 204 00:19:36.540 --> 00:19:41.780 great. The colors are perfect. But I was thinking that we wanted to create a tie that would 205 00:19:41.780 --> 00:19:47.780 be the kind of tie that you would look in your wardrobe and say that this one was stood 206 00:19:47.780 --> 00:19:54.020 out above all the rest. The goal was to create the most beautiful tie you've ever seen. And 207 00:19:54.020 --> 00:20:24.020 not just another institutional tie, oh, Mises Institute tie, no, not that, it was going to be great, and sure enough, it turned out just great, so, now, I was at, just last night, I took my, I was wearing a bow tie, and I took my son to his baseball practice, and it was his first baseball practice, and the coach, there's a coach personality, I don't know if you know this, but, there's a coach thing, and anyway, I said to the coach, I had to leave, I said to the coach, I'm so sorry that I can't assist you this year in coaching, you know, the team, 208 00:20:24.020 --> 00:20:27.980 and you know he took he stood back a little bit and he looked me up and down 209 00:20:27.980 --> 00:20:33.020 like that he said well that's fine really I don't I don't that's fine don't 210 00:20:33.020 --> 00:20:36.700 worry about it almost and I thought later did he think that I because I was 211 00:20:36.700 --> 00:20:44.220 wearing a bow tie that I somehow could not coach so I went I went back to the 212 00:20:44.220 --> 00:20:48.660 practice later and true this is what this is what he was yelling to the boys 213 00:20:48.660 --> 00:20:52.820 he said boys you need to hustle out there you look weak they're gonna start 214 00:20:52.820 --> 00:20:55.820 They're calling us the bow ties, if you're not careful. 215 00:20:55.820 --> 00:20:58.820 That's what he said. 216 00:20:58.820 --> 00:21:00.820 That's what he said. 217 00:21:00.820 --> 00:21:03.820 There's a coach way. 218 00:21:03.820 --> 00:21:05.820 Well, I'll leave you with that. 219 00:21:05.820 --> 00:21:09.820 If you have any other questions about publishing or any of our projects, 220 00:21:09.820 --> 00:21:10.820 please ask. 221 00:21:10.820 --> 00:21:13.820 We all love to talk about the subject. 222 00:21:13.820 --> 00:21:15.820 Thank you very much. 223 00:21:15.820 --> 00:21:17.820 Thank you very much.